What are smart glasses? They are a device that are indeed glasses, but not your typical ones. The word “smart” says a lot considering we have labeled our phones and televisions as such. Like these devices, smart glasses are able to access the Internet, accomplish certain tasks, and run applications as well. Smart glasses do all that right in front of your eyes, right in your field of vision.

According to the following article, “The main purpose of smart glasses is to provide users with information and services relevant for their contexts and useful for the users to perform their tasks; in other words, such devices augment users’ senses. In addition, they allow users to do basic operations available on today common mobile devices such as reading, writing e-mails, writing text messages, making notes, and answering calls” (paragraph 5). This is incredible indeed, however an immediate question popped into my head when reading the article: Will this make human kind disconnected or even more disconnected? We already look at our screens all the time, whether it be on a smart phone, laptop, or a television screen; will having wearable glasses that do the same thing, would they on top of disconnecting us, cause less awareness and therefore become a safety hazard?

The author expresses that the potential problem with the glasses could be similar or the same concerns that surrounded camera phones when they first arrived. Privacy is a concern that the author of the article expresses, on top of the way the device would work, and how certain people would find it beneficial to their lives.

“As for technical characteristics, a gesture recognition system for HWD should ideally be very accurate, i.e. able to distinguish fine shapebased gestures, insensitive to daylight, as small as possible, consume low power, and be robust in noisy and cluttered environment that are typical conditions in everyday life scenarios. As far as user experience is concerned, the physical effort required to users to interact with the devices is relevant, as well as easiness of use and encumbrance of the device”, states the article, which brings me to another question: are we so technologically advanced, that one of the first concerns when a convenient and “hip” new innovation reaches the public, is how easy it is to use and how it can be used in ways that we do not use other technology already?

What’s missing from this paper is further analysis on the way the smart glasses can impact humans in a social setting. It briefly covers the concern of privacy and what method is most convenient to use the glasses.

In “What is New Media”, Lee Manovich goes over certain characteristics found in technological innovations: numerical representation, modularity, automation, variability, and transcoding. The smart glasses carry all of the characteristics, since the glasses are made to mimic a computer or smart phone in many ways. Modularity is found in smart glasses because each function is working like the web for instance, separately and jointly. Automation, which is a mix of modularity and numerical representation, is about mimicking human thought. If the glasses are to be handled in a body-gesture method or a hand-to-face method, then in a way, the smart glasses would be mimicking human thought, since they would have to be programmed to be able to read that nonverbal human language. Variability and transcoding are definitely characteristics since the smart glasses are an innovation that came about due to smart devices, so they are similar but represented differently physically. He further states, “To understand the logic of new media, we need to turn to computer science. It is there that we may expect to find the new terms, categories, and operations that characterize media that became programmable. From media studies, we move to something that can be called “software studies”–from media theory to software theory” (Pg 48).

Nick Couldry, in his introduction to “Digital Media and Social Theory”, states: “Media suffuse our sense—our various sense—of living in a world: a social world, an imaginative world, the world of global politics and confrontation” (Pg 1). This makes me think about the smart glasses, because they are stimulating not only our brains but our sense of vision of course (which helps us perceive the world around us on a large scale), since the glasses are literally right in front of our eyes. As if having the screens of our televisions, smart phones, and computers in our faces is not enough. Glasses in general hide you in a way, when one is wearing sun glasses for example, we cannot see their eyes which are a big form of communication and interaction. I believe that the smart glasses may be a big “hit”, but I do not believe that they will benefit us as social beings. Further more, the show Black Mirror makes me think about how technological advances can change our society completely, perhaps causing much negativity. Back to the concern from the author of the article I first mentioned, technological devices can indeed be a violation of privacy. The smart glasses remind me of an episode of Black Mirror. I posted the trailer of it below. If smart glasses can do so many things like other smart devices, would we lose our privacy if we have the ability to so conveniently and easily, record everything we see to play it back as a video/memory?